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"Where are all the celebrities?" That's a question many supporters of #BlackLivesMatter protests are asking. At this moment of great unrest, some are feeling a lack of leadership from those who have worldwide media platforms. Many black actors and musicians have made public statements to express their sorrow and frustration over the Michael Brown and Eric Garner grand jury decisions. John Legend hired food trucks to feed protesters in New York. Hip-hop celebrity J. Cole joined the marchers. Philadelphia rapper Chill Moody wrote a song, "We're Worth More." But there's a feeling that the super-famous haven't really stepped up to the plate....

Related "Rodney King" Articles

"Where are all the celebrities?"
That's a question many supporters of #BlackLivesMatter protests are asking. At this moment of great unrest, some are feeling a lack of leadership from those who have worldwide media platforms.
Many black actors...

This should not even need saying, but obviously, it does. So, for the record:
To oppose police brutality is not to oppose police. No one with a brain stands against police when they do the dangerous and often-dirty job of safeguarding life and...

In the past few weeks there has been a lot of discussion about President Barack Obama's response to the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases. Each failure to win indictment for the officers who killed these unarmed black men has left millions of...

I am struck by the fact that there were demonstrations throughout the country Monday night in reaction to the grand jury decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the death of Michael Brown ("Ferguson's grievance," Nov. 25). The...

Baltimore lawmakers and community activists called Sunday for more reforms and federal oversight of the city's Police Department after learning about broken bones and battered faces from an investigation into allegations of police brutality in recent...

The author Porochista Khakpour's earliest memory is of being terrified by anti-aircraft missiles dropping near her Tehran home during the Iran-Iraq f War.
Her shell-shocked family relocated to Los Angeles in the 1980s — and she had barely entered her...

In a mostly empty ninth-floor conference room on a recent Thursday evening, the civilian panel charged with investigating police misconduct in Baltimore met for its monthly meeting.
There are supposed to be nine members, but four chairs were empty —...

Baltimore's next police commissioner is walking through a west-side neighborhood with some of the community's most engaged residents, but that's not enough for Anthony W. Batts. He wants to talk to a teacher sipping coffee on her porch. He jogs across...

I am in total agreement with writer Julius Colon's letter about the problem of nonconforming liquor stores in Baltimore ("Park Heights wants fewer liquor stores," June 26). His warning about the proliferation of liquor stores in his community...

A rumpled pile of sheets. A Bloody Mary on an airline tray. Bags of mustard greens from a Korean grocery store. Gas station pumps, battered street signs, a steamed crab.
These are among the everyday images encountered by artist and University of...

Los Angeles television news pioneer Stan Chambers, who had a front-row seat to earthquakes, fires and the life of the city since the 1940s, died Friday, according to KTLA-TV, the station where he was a reporter for more than six decades. He was 91....

He was the surly pizza man who interrupted a class at Ridgemont High to deliver a double-cheese-and-sausage to the cool-guy student played by Sean Penn.
He was the Olsen twins' prissy, Spanish-accented nanny, Manuelo, on "So Little Time." He...

Los Angeles will purchase 7,000 cameras for police officers to wear while on patrol, making the city a laboratory in the use of devices that bring the promise of more transparent policing but also concerns about civilian privacy.Los Angeles would be the...

Taylor Negron, a comedian and actor who was a fixture in Los Angeles comedy clubs as well as a playwright who penned “Gangster Planet” after the 1992 Rodney King verdict riots, died Saturday. He was 57.
Negron’s death from cancer was announced by his...

There's a line in New York rapper ASAP Ferg's syrupy new track "Talk It," a musical response to the death of Michael Brown and the subsequent riots in Ferguson, Mo., that underscored the calcified nature of relations between black communities...

Whatever happened to "Obamamania"? Recent polls suggest that race relations have gotten worse since President Barack Obama's 2008 election — or, at least, that more Americans think they have.
It didn't help anybody's feeling of sunny delight...

Like Walt Whitman, Roger Guenveur Smith contains multitudes. In various past one-man shows he has portrayed Huey P. Newton, baseball brawling immortals Juan Marichal and John Roseboro and dozens of others, while probing the great American themes of...

Much that was old was new again in 2013, which turned out to be a very good year for the classics.
It wasn't a bad year for new work either, even if too many of today's most provocative playwrights are getting short shrift from this town's nonprofit...

— Long before the one-year audition, long before the nomadic decade of 10-day contracts strung together in the NBA, and long before his first meeting with Jim Calhoun, Kevin Ollie was learning the art of survival in the most real sense of that...

Rodney King never set out to be a James Meredith or Rosa Parks.
He was a drunk, unemployed construction worker on parole when he careened into the city's consciousness in a white Hyundai early one Sunday morning in 1991.
While he was enduring the...